Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment, as examples. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductive layers of material over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon.
Upper material layers of some semiconductor devices include metallization layers in which conductive lines and vias are formed. The conductive lines and vias provide interconnects for the integrated circuits formed on or over the semiconductor substrate. The metallization layers include multi-level interconnects that are typically formed in back-end-of-line (BEOL) processes.
The semiconductor industry continues to improve the integration density of various electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, conductive lines, vias, etc.) by continual reductions in minimum feature size, which allow more components to be integrated into a given area. As feature sizes are reduced, manufacturing processes of semiconductor devices become more challenging.
Corresponding numerals and symbols in the different figures generally refer to corresponding parts unless otherwise indicated. The figures are drawn to clearly illustrate the relevant aspects of the embodiments and are not necessarily drawn to scale.